


between the striking and the fire

by Myargalargan



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ATLA Winter Solstice Exchange, ATLA Winter Solstice Exchange 2020, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Post-Canon, sharing folklore around a fire, zuko character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28081146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myargalargan/pseuds/Myargalargan
Summary: On a post-war visit to Kyoshi Island, Zuko, Mai, Sokka, and Suki gather around the fire and tell stories about the stars. Zuko finds steadiness in the pulse of the flames, the swell of the waves, and the improbability of the people beside him.
Relationships: Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Sokka/Suki (Avatar)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 49
Collections: ATLA Winter Solstice 2020





	between the striking and the fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [haylestorming (lovable_and_lovable)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovable_and_lovable/gifts).



> Written for the ATLA Winter Solstice Exchange 2020! I had such a blast participating in this and getting to work so closely with other creators. Very special shout out to [haylestorming (lovable_and_lovable)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovable_and_lovable/pseuds/haylestorming), who not only tagged me on Tumblr to encourage me to sign up, but who ended up being both my giftee *and* the writer I beta-read for! XD So, yeah, haylestorming, I loved writing for you and I really hope you enjoy the story! <3 <3
> 
> And thank you thank you immensely to my beta, [JustAnotherGhostwriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherGhostwriter/pseuds/JustAnotherGhostwriter), who was so thoughtful and encouraging, and who gave me a lot of beautiful, insightful analysis to guide me where I wanted to go!
> 
> Title is from Emiliana Torrini's "Jungle Drum":
> 
> _"Man, you got me burning,_   
>  _I'm the moment between the striking and the fire"_

A dense, incandescent cloud of stars trailed across the sky, a fading ink stain on the silver-spattered firmament. The sun was just a glowing ember on the horizon now, the last stutter of breath at the bottom of a long exhale. Zuko sucked in air through his nose, but then he let his body softly deflate, allowed his shoulders to sink as the last of the light melted away, instead of holding onto the final dregs of the sun’s energy like he normally would. Tonight, there was a crackling bonfire and the chatter of friends. The whisper of waves on the shore and the fizzle of sea foam seeping into the sand. Tonight, for the first time in a very, very long time, he was calm. 

“I guess I missed the Double Seventh Festival,” Suki mused. She threw a stick onto the fire, which kicked up sparks that danced and scattered away from the flicking tails of the bonfire’s flames. “I wonder if they even had it this year.” 

Double seventh. The seventh day of the seventh month; the one day a year when two star-crossed spirit-lovers were allowed to meet. 

“The Double-What Festival?” Sokka asked, at the same time as Zuko asked, “Kyoshi Island has that legend, too?” 

“Ugh, I always hated that story. So melodramatic,” Mai said from where she was lounging next to Zuko. Her voice was honey sprinkled with cinders, and he’d learned that this combination was somehow exactly his taste. 

“Says the girl who literally risked her life to rescue a boy who’d just dumped her,” Suki said, with her head cocked and a lilt in her tone. 

“What. Story?” Sokka insisted. 

Zuko turned to study Mai. She’d leveled a look at Suki, but there was no heat in it, despite the dagger’s edge of her sardonic smile. The softness in her eyebrows gave away her amusement, and if he didn’t think he’d be scolded for getting sand in her eyes, he would’ve reached out to smooth his thumb across that subtle arch in her brow. 

As if in the distance, he heard Suki chuckle and say, “But then, I went to prison for a bison, so who am I to talk?” For a moment, her voice and Sokka’s faded into the murmur of the waves of Kyoshi Bay, and there was nothing except for the firelight illuminating Mai’s cheekbones and the curve of her ear. Zuko took Mai’s hand, and her gaze shifted to his, and his blood thrummed in time to the heartbeat of amber in her eyes. When he put her knuckles to his lips and felt the chill of her skin against his, he knew it was from the warmth leaving his body to travel into hers, and he gave it up gladly. 

A shriek drew his attention suddenly back to his other side, where Suki was laughing, Sokka’s wrists clamped in her fists. 

“Alright, I’m telling it, I’m telling it!” she howled breathlessly. “You knucklehead.” 

The way Suki said “you knucklehead” really sounded more like “ _my_ knucklehead,” and the way Sokka smiled back at her was really more like a sunburst. Suki dropped Sokka’s arms, and he immediately wrapped one around her shoulders. 

“The legend goes,” she started, “that a beautiful young princess was weaving by the river one day, when she saw and instantly fell in love with a handsome young gemsbok bullherd—” 

“No, wait,” Zuko interrupted. He could hear Uncle telling the story in his head, was anticipating the details before Suki said them aloud, and had jolted into awareness at the discrepancy. “The boy was a hippo oxherd.” 

“Whatever,” Suki waved her hands dismissively. “The two fell in love and were so distracted by one another that the princess neglected her weaving duties, and the herdsman neglected his herdsman duties, and it made the princess’s father so mad—” 

“It was the weaver princess’s mother—” 

He winced even as he said it 

“Zuko!” Suki chided, laughing. And when he heard Mai’s quiet chuckle next to him, the husky smoke of it, and felt the squeeze of her hand around his fingers, he laughed a little, too. He tipped his head, obligingly, apologetically, and Suki continued. 

“The princess’s father — or mother, or great-grandaunt — got so mad, that the two were forbidden from seeing each other again and were banished to opposite sides of the Great Spirit River.” 

Suki gestured to the inky cloud of stars, and with a sly grin tugging unwittingly at the corner of his mouth, Zuko issued one more correction. 

“Actually, it’s called the Silver River.” 

“For Kyoshi’s sake, Zuko, it doesn’t matter!” 

And then Suki shoved him. Not hard, but the contact was so unexpected that Zuko tumbled into Mai, who caught him with one hand on his chest. Leaning into her as he now was, Zuko could feel Mai’s body shaking with barely-suppressed laughter. Her fingers curled into the front of his tunic, and he made no effort to right himself. 

“I’m sorry, Zuko, I didn’t mean to push you over…” Suki snorted behind her hand. 

“Nah, he was just looking for an excuse to get closer to his woman,” Sokka jibed. 

“Such a hopeless romantic,” Mai teased, and she trailed one long fingernail along his jaw. “It figures why you’d be so picky about that story.” 

Zuko sighed. In that faraway manner again, he heard Suki demand, “ _His_ woman?” and Sokka fumbling, “Not, like...in a possessive way. I just mean—” 

“If that’s the out I’m being given,” Zuko said to Mai before lowering his forehead to her shoulder, “I’ll take it.” 

She smelled like campfire, and something peppery-sweet that reminded him of the gardens at the palace. He gave himself a few breaths to be encapsulated by her, but before he did something desperate and immodest like set his teeth on the curve of her jawline, he lifted his head again. The smile she gave him was a secret, and the look in her eyes was a promise. Then she pinched his chin between her thumb and the first knuckle of her forefinger, and he was back on solid ground again. 

“Look, if it makes you two feel any better,” Sokka was saying, “you’re both wrong.” 

“Excuse me — _what_ , exactly, are we wrong about?” Despite sounding indignant, Suki was comfortably reclined against Sokka’s side. The arm he still had around her shoulders was draped loosely in front of her, and Suki was idly picking at something on his glove. 

“And how is that supposed to make us feel better?” Zuko asked. 

“The story,” Sokka elaborated with a shrug. “You’re wrong because _that_ —” he pointed to the milky trail of stars, “—is not a river. It’s snowshoe tracks from the owl raven spirit. And that’s supposed to make you feel better because, since you’re both wrong, Zuko, _you_ won’t turn into a screeching tea pot arguing with Suki—” 

“Hmph.” 

“—and Suki, _you_ can reign in your bloodlust and just relax with your cute, smart, definitely-right-about-this boyfriend.” 

Suki paused in her ministrations, her lips pinched together, while she appeared to consider Sokka’s answer. 

“Why would an owl raven wear snowshoes? Wouldn’t it just fly?” 

“Why would a _spirit_ need shoes at all?” Mai added. 

For a moment, with Mai’s voice on his left side and Sokka and Suki’s on his right, Zuko was suspended between two competing realities. A dimension between gemsbok bullherd and hippo oxherd. Between silver river and owl raven tracks. 

“Don’t ask me— _ouch!_ ” Sokka yelped. “That’s my skin.” 

Suki bit her lip. 

“Sorry.” 

Sokka flexed his fist absently, and Suki placated him with a kiss on the back of his hand. A piece of charcoal popped in the middle of the fire. 

“Wait,” Sokka said, suddenly perturbed. “Why do you have a festival to celebrate two lovers being separated by a river?” 

“I thought it wasn’t a river,” Mai quipped; and when Sokka slumped and rolled his eyes with a sigh, drawing a light chuckle out of Mai, Zuko’s competing realities began to bleed together. 

“We don’t,” Suki answered. “We celebrate their reunion.” 

“This sounds like Omashu all over again. Is there a secret celestial tunnel and a song of doom involved?” 

“No,” Suki snickered, “but there is a bridge of pheasant cranes. And don’t you correct me!” Suki jabbed a finger at Zuko, face imperious and hawklike, and he raised his hands in surrender. 

“Actually,” drawled Mai as she leaned forward to accept the challenge, “it’s a bridge of magpie pheasants.” 

“Augh!” Suki threw her hands up and collapsed backwards onto Sokka’s lap, then shot a glare — albeit a toothless one — up at Sokka when he couldn’t stop laughing. 

When Zuko turned to look at Mai, he felt like he was blazing. And when she looked down with a soft smile, and batted his face away with the same ferocity as a clawless kitten swiping at a dangling string, he knew his feelings were spilling all over the place. An argent flood of stars. Taking a page out of Sokka’s book, Zuko wrapped one arm around Mai’s shoulders. She curled against him, tucking a hand into one of the folds in his tunic for warmth, and he thought how strange it was to feel so much like a sun when it was obviously he who was orbiting her. 

“Anyway, _as_ I was saying,” Suki announced. Zuko felt a fingertip drill briefly into his thigh. “The princess’s…parental figure…eventually felt so guilty about keeping the princess from her love, that the two were allowed to reunite. But only on the seventh day of the seventh month, when a bridge of magpie pheasant cranes forms over the Great Silver Spirit River. That’s the Double Seventh Festival: the one day a year when two young lovers, usually separated by such a large expanse of water, can come together again.” 

“Kind of sounds like us,” Sokka said in a low voice Zuko didn’t think he was meant to hear. 

“Sokka…” 

Zuko abruptly began scrutinizing the bonfire. The occasional flutter of blue at the base. The way sparks would leap into the air and melt into the canopy of stars above. He dug his toes down into the sand, below the top layer that had been warmed by the sun and the fire and possibly his own firebending-enhanced body heat. Down until the sand was damp and cold on his skin. Until the wriggling of his toes created little sand mounds, like turtle crabs breaking through the surface. Then Mai tucked herself more securely into his shoulder. One cool fingertip found its way to the dip in his collarbone, and if she tilted her head a fraction of a millimeter, her lips would be on the hollow of his throat. Zuko wondered idly if he’d be able to create enough energy with his feet to turn the sand to glass. 

When he heard something jostling dully near his elbow, he looked down and away from the fire. Suki was holding out a wooden tray with seaweed-wrapped triangles, and she shook it again when Zuko did nothing but look. A glance further to his right revealed Suki nibbling at one of the rice balls and Sokka with his cheeks bulging, looking as though he’d stuffed two into his mouth at once. 

“Thanks,” Zuko said, wiping his palms on his tunic front before taking the tray. 

Suki smiled. Then she turned to look at Sokka, and it was as if smiles hadn’t been invented until the very moment her eyes met his. She tapped a finger at the corner of her mouth to indicate where there was a grain of rice stuck to Sokka’s face, but rather than attend to himself, he reached out to gently brush his thumb across Suki’s cheek. She laughed and batted his arm away, resolving to pick the grain of rice off Sokka’s face herself. 

“Hey, I was saving that!” he protested after she flicked the piece of rice into the fire. 

A tug at the neck of his tunic drew Zuko’s attention back to Mai, who raised her eyebrows expectantly. He raised his brow in response, attempting to decipher her expression, letting his gaze fall to her mouth, which curved while he lingered. 

“The onigiri, Zuko,” she said, and Zuko cleared his throat. 

“Oh. Right.” 

He picked a rice ball out of the tray for himself and then held the tray out for her, but rather than take it, she simply parted her lips. Chuckling, Zuko offered Mai the rice ball he’d taken for himself, and after she bit off one corner, Zuko let his knuckle graze her bottom lip as he pulled his hand away. 

“Sokka,” Zuko heard Suki say. With a grin, Mai plucked the partially-eaten onigiri from his fingers and took a slightly larger bite. Zuko shook his head and chose a new one. “Tell us the story of the owl raven and his snowshoes.” 

“Oh, well, it’s not really a _story_ like your lovers on a bird bridge. It’s more of a…universal truth.” 

“Obviously not _universal_ —” 

“The great owl raven spirit,” Sokka hurtled on, his voice suddenly lofty, “being a very old spirit — and clever, too — had knowledge of many secrets. Like how to make fire and clothing, and how to build shelter and canoes. 

“The owl raven spirit was also, on occasion, a benevolent spirit,” he continued, lifting one outstretched hand, “and when he saw humans struggling to survive the harsh winter, without feathers to keep them warm or beaks to help them hunt, he took it upon himself to teach them his secrets.” 

Zuko met Suki’s widened eyes and shrugged, the corners of his mouth twitching. 

“So,” Sokka said, “he showed the people of the southern tribes how to fish, and then traveled across the sky to teach the northern tribes how to dress pelts. He went back across the sky to show the southern tribes how to burn oil, and then returned to show the northern tribes how to float on water. And with each journey, his snowshoes carved a deeper and wider path across the stars.” 

As Sokka concluded, he swept his arm in a broad arc, following the cosmic path of the owl raven’s snowshoe tracks. 

“Sokka…” Suki marveled. “That was a really good story.” 

He shrugged. 

“Gran-gran and the other elders used to recite all kinds of myths like that when I was a kid. We’d all sit around the fire, and sometimes they’d even let me and Katara play the drums…” 

“I’d like to hear that,” said Suki, putting her hand over Sokka’s when he trailed off. 

“Really? Like, right now?” 

“No, I mean at the South Pole sometime. With your village.” 

Something in Sokka’s face relaxed — the lift of his eyebrows, or the set of his mouth; a gradual transformation accentuated by the oscillation of the firelight. He looked at Suki as if memorizing her, as if _looking_ were a tactile thing he was trying to bestow upon her. 

“Yeah, I’d like to hear those legends, too,” Zuko said, watching as Sokka’s expression hardened into determination. 

“Oh, alright,” Mai added, the reluctance in her voice belied by the fact that she hadn’t needed convincing to speak up in the first place. “Me too.” 

“Next stop on the Zuko Apology Tour?” Sokka slid his arm around Suki’s shoulders again, and she smiled up at him indulgently. 

“Sokka, we’re not calling it that,” Zuko argued. 

“It’s like I said: until you come up with a better name…” He trailed off, flipping his palm skyward, as if to demonstrate that the matter was entirely outside of his control. 

“I thought we were calling it ‘Zuko Regains His Honor But For Real This Time’?” offered Mai, but Sokka shook his head. 

“Too wordy.” 

“What about ‘Zuko’s Truce…ko’?” suggested Suki. 

“I mean…it’s awful, but that’s legitimately the funniest thing you’ve ever said.” 

“You all are just…the worst friends,” said Zuko. But when he said “the worst,” it really sounded like he’d said a different, riskier word altogether. He watched the fire for a moment, waiting to see if those words would pop and shatter in the flames like over-wet driftwood. Instead, Suki nudged his knee with the bottom of her foot, and Sokka lobbed a piece of char at his head, and Mai brushed the hair back from his forehead, her fingers trailing along the edge of his scarred ear. It was a touch he could barely feel, but at the same time, he knew her touch so well that it was as strong, as present, as the sound of Sokka and Suki’s banter on his other side. That sensation of dueling realities flickered, then resolved, while the flames before him leapt almost playfully around the ash-white logs they consumed. It occurred to Zuko in that moment that the fuel, and the combustion, were no more or less a part of the fire than the warmth, and the light. 

With a smile, he palmed the piece of burnt wood Sokka had thrown at him. It was no bigger than a pebble, and he cradled it in one hand while he reached out to Mai with the other. Tucking his fingertips into her hair where it had been gathered away from her neck, he lowered his lips to her cheek, holding the kiss until she hummed. Then, after pulling away, he turned to his right and, with needle-point precision, flicked the pebble of charcoal so that it pegged Sokka directly between the eyes. 

“What the—?!” Sokka squawked. Suki doubled over with laughter, and Sokka began scrabbling around in the sand looking for something he could use to retaliate. “Oh, you are _so_ going to regret that!” 

While Sokka was occupied, Zuko whipped back around to Mai and grinned. 

“Let’s go,” he said, taking her hands and pulling her with him to their feet. He stumbled a bit as they skirted around the fire, then broke into a run as soon as they were clear. 

“Get back here, Fire Lord Jerkface!” Sokka cried. 

“Why did you drag me into this?” Mai huffed, her voice riding on the shadow of a smile. 

“Don’t go in the water or the unagi will eat you!” Suki called after all of them. 

Zuko ran, Mai’s hand in his, Sokka and Suki in pursuit, towards the point where the Silver River met the horizon. And as he and Mai left tracks in their wake, he felt the spray of the sand kicked up by their heels, scattering and settling and whispering against his ankles, like the brush of night-black magpie feathers. 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, there's a lot of Milky Way lore in this one! I tried to honor the real-world inspirations while also putting an ATLA-universe spin on them, but if I misrepresented anything, please do correct me!
> 
> So we have the Double Seventh Festival, which is celebrated in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The festival and the story associated with it is pretty much as Suki describes, except with real-life animals instead of hippo oxen and pheasant cranes. It's based on the story _The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl_ \- the cowherd is the star Altair and the weaver girl is the star Vega, and they meet once a year by crossing the Milky Way. 
> 
> Suki and Zuko bickering over terminology comes from the fact that in China, the Double Seventh Festival is called the Qixi Festival, in Japan it's called Tanabata, in Korea it's called Chilseok, and in Vietnam it's Thất Tịch. And in each language and culture, there are slightly different names for the characters in the story. The Milky Way is called the Silver River throughout East Asia, and is also called the River of Heaven in Japan. All these different words refer to the essentially the same things, so I played with these linguistic differences while Suki and Zuko teased each other. 
> 
> Finally, in some Inuit cultures, the Milky Way is called "aviguti," which means "divider" and is said to be the track made by Raven's snowshoes while he traveled across the sky creating the world. Raven with a capital R is a figure in many Inuit stories, including some creation stories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I could not find nearly as many sources on Inuit Milky Way stories as I could the story of the cowherd and the weaver girl, so I extrapolated from what I did find to give Sokka a narrative to tell that was based around the Northern and Southern Water Tribes. In Sokka's story, Raven is a spirit rather than explicitly the creator of the world.


End file.
